Organising Armageddon: Behind the Haiti rescue

This article was taken from the June issue of Wired
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Pauli Immonen is quick-marching the length of the Tarmac at
Port-au-Prince's crippled airport, looking for a missing 737. It's
not as if he can just check the arrivals board -- the7.0-magnitude
earthquake that rocked the Haitian capital eight days ago has left
the main terminal a flooded, deserted husk.

The floors are littered with broken ceiling tiles, and inch-wide
cracks snake along the walls. Outside, Immonen skirts a runway
crowded with military transports and chartered jets; the flock of
small planes that usually roosts here has been forced on to an
adjacent patch of grass.

The noise is as oppressive as the afternoon heat -- deep rumbles
from taxiing aircraft, the basso whup-whup of helicopter blades,
the grumbling and reverse-signal beeps of forklifts and buses.
Spotting a promising-looking Boeing, the lean, 42-year-old Finn
hurries over to the two Nordic types at the foot of the stairs
leading up to the plane and introduces himself.

Sure enough, it's the flight from Iceland he is expecting -- a
civilian charter, here to drop off aid and a relief team and pick
up a search and - rescue crew. Immonen bounds up the steps and
talks to more people until he finds someone from the Ministry for
Foreign Affairs. The official asks if he'd care to step outside and
check their cargo. "Yes," Immonen replies crisply, in flawless
English. "But first, let me get a drink from one of your lovely
ladies." A flight attendant looks up with a professional smile and
opens a snack laden drawer in the galley. She extracts a couple of
Fantas. Immonen courteously requests a tube of Pringles as well.
He's worked enough disasters to know that you have to grab
high-calorie snacks when you can.

Immonen hit the ground in Port-au-Prince less than 72 hours
after the quake. He arrived from Helsinki with little more than a
mosquito net, a sleeping bag, a laptop and a sat phone. When he
snatches a few hours of sleep, it's in a tent pitched 100 metres
from the airport runway. A member of one of the Red Cross Emergency
Response Units, Immonen has been a first responder in crisis zones
from Darfur to Afghanistan to Pakistan. His job is to wrangle
aircraft, making sure that the people and materials on every Red
Cross relief flight get to where they're supposed to be.

He's been fascinated by aircraft since he was a kid, hanging
around the local airport taking snapshots of planes. He converted
his Finnish Air Force training into a stint with the United Nations
peacekeeping force in Lebanon and has been doing humanitarian work
since 1995.

Crisps in hand, Immonen sets out across the tarmac again,
exchanging rapid-fire radio calls with the Red Cross base camp a
couple of miles away in Port-au-Prince and text messages with its
logistics hub in Panama. A second flight, this one from Germany,
has also arrived.

He finds the plane and gets to work, lining up trucks to shift
its cargo. He shakes hands with at least 20 people in as many
minutes, extracting and dispensing required information, bluntly
cutting off conversations when they wander off-topic. "I'm not
polite," Immonen tells me. "If you make one mistake, the shipment
goes to the wrong place, and then it might as well be lost."
Getting aid to the right place is the reason Immonen -- and
hundreds of others -- are here. The world responded to the Haiti
earth quake with one of the biggest aid efforts ever mounted,
sending thousands of tonnes of food, water and medicine to a tiny
island that had little infrastructure even before the ground
started convulsing.

Physically moving those supplies into the country, let alone
getting them into the hands of the millions who needed help, posed
a logistical problem of epic proportions. The capital's port was
wrecked, its airport badly damaged, and its roads choked with
bodies. More than 200,000 people were dead; at least two million
were homeless. For people like Immonen, it was the latest in a
lifetime of urgent reasons to fly halfway around the world. But the
disaster was also a rare opportunity to test methods and
technologies that define "mission critical".

For the world's emergency relief agencies, Haiti is the latest
on-the-job experiment in the developing field of humanitarian
logistics. Despite the massive scale of operations, only in recent
years have the people who deliver disaster aid begun to benefit
from the kind of data-driven decision-making and rigorous academic
study that their commercial and military counterparts rely on. In
the past decade, the responses to major disasters have been
analysed in hundreds of case studies and pored over by experts,
their conclusions field-tested in subsequent crises where yet more
data is collected.

Learning the right lessons could not be more important: the
stakes are life and death. Today, more people than ever are
vulnerable to natural disasters. Population growth and
environmental degradation mean that the average number of people
requiring help each year after storms, droughts, epidemics and
other catastrophes has skyrocketed in recent decades.

An estimated ten million are hit by floods every year.
Earthquakes are an even more lethal threat, particularly in poor
countries. Portau-au-Prince and its environs collapsed because of
the shoddy construction that is the norm in developing-world
megalopolises from Mexico City to Chengdu.

Haiti's 7.0 quake ranks among the deadliest ever recorded, on a
par with the quake-induced tsunami that struck Indian Ocean
shorelines in 2004. Indeed, in the past 40 years, earthquakes and
the tsunamis they generate have killed more people than any other
kind of natural disaster.

In 2008, government and private donors gave $6.6 billion to
international response efforts, nearly triple the 2000 total. It
seems to be helping: since 1975, the number of people actually
killed in disasters annually has dropped by almost half. Still,
there's no question that the global emergency relief system has
significant shortcomings.

Governed for decades more by rules of thumb than research, it's
still more art than science. Humanitarian supply chains suffer from
a chronic lack of co-ordination. Dozens or even hundreds of groups
swarm into disaster zones, duplicating efforts and competing for
trucks, fuel and food. Lynn Fritz thinks he can help. He built his
family's customs-brokerage company into a global logistics outfit
with branches in 123 countries. As a result, his employees were
often victims of disasters themselves.

"Every year, there would be an earthquake that would stop us
from working somewhere," Fritz says. "We got good at getting our
people back to work quickly. But I found that none of my employees
were happy with the help they got from aid organisations."

In 2001, after selling the business to UPS for a reported $450
million, he founded the Fritz Institute, a San Francisco -- based
consultancy intended to take his company's experience of moving
goods and apply it to the unruly world of emergency aid.

It has since become a catalyst in a growing drive to improve the
performance of relief agencies. Among other things, Fritz launched
an annual conference on humanitarian logistics that brought many of
the key practitioners together for the first time and helped spur
university programmes aimed at bringing sophisticated research to
bear on the field. "Humanitarian logistics in 2001 was similar to
where commercial logistics were when I started out," he says. "Now
it's going through the same evolution, from an obscure back-office
thing to, 'Christ, this is important!'"